'Gourmet Today' is a cookbook for the times

Foodies mourning the magazine's demise find solace in recipes

By GREG MORAGO Houston Chronicle

Published 1:00 am, Thursday, October 8, 2009

In light of Monday's announcement that the November issue of Gourmet magazine will be its last, the very recent publication of the "Gourmet Today" cookbook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) is either advantageous or slightly cruel.

By embracing the new face of food and forecasting the brave tomorrow with recipes that are lighter, use more herbs and spices, travel the globe for flavor inspiration, incorporate more vegetables and think with a mind conscious of our planet, "Gourmet Today" is a 1,000-page omnibus cookbook that boldly confronts the new face of a changing food landscape.

"Gourmet Today" is a cookbook that flexes in other interesting ways, too, by offering about 650 dishes that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less; more than 100 vegetable side dishes; nearly 100 cocktails and nonalcoholic drinks; international hors d'oeuvres and main courses; more than 230 desserts and an entire chapter on grilled foods.

The force behind the heavyweight of a cookbook is Ruth Reichl, who edited this smart companion for the contemporary American kitchen. It was a trip to the grocery store — when she discovered that there was an entire department called "Rices of the World" — that provided inspiration to create a cookbook that addressed a new culinary reality.

"I began to see that, while I hadn't been paying attention, the supermarket had been transformed. Walking through the store, I was struck by how much the way we eat has changed over the past few years," Reichl stated. "It seemed to me that we needed to create a cookbook that deals with this new reality."

Here is how Reichl sees this new reality and how her new cookbook addresses it:

Q: You write that a new cookbook deals with the new reality of our food lives right now. Can you define that new reality? How does it reflect the way we eat today?

A: There are a number of new realities. One is that we have the most educated, curious, open-minded generation of cooks and eaters in the history of the world. These are the 20-somethings today who grew up eating sushi, traveling, and are very open-minded. Their sense of food isn't hamburgers and hot dogs, it's global cuisine. Secondly, because of the recession we have a group of people thinking of money in a different way. Suddenly, money really matters. Thirdly, we have a new concept of what time is when we cook. It used to be that if you considered yourself a great cook, you didn't care how much time it took to cook. Today we understand that the reality is you have to get something on the table quickly. The food companies and supermarkets have tried to help us with this.

I think it's really an exciting time. The other reality is that we're coming to understand the ethics of eating. People care about sustainability.

Q: The abundance of what we can find in our supermarkets suggests we are more sophisticated eaters. And yet we're confronted with an economy forcing us to make wiser food choices. Doesn't that put the foodie in a weird place: having the palate for eating better and more adventurously, and yet not being able to afford it all?

A: But I think that's a good thing. That means we become more conscious cooks. We don't waste food. Maybe dinner isn't a hunk of meat surrounded by a little bit of vegetables and starch. Maybe we need to rethink and focus on a vegetable diet. It's not going to be steak every night. Maybe we select a meat that has to be braised and cooked a long time. To me, that's a good thing and a reason we're looking to foods of other cultures like Asia and India that use meat in different ways.

That's one of the things different about this cookbook: We recognize if you're feeding young people today, you're going to have to be feeding vegetarians.

Q: You say this has never been a more exciting time in cooking. Ten or 20 years from now, how will we look at this time: 2009 and 2010? What will be its food legacy?

A: I think we're going to look back and say this is the moment when Americans finally understood the rightful place of food in our society. We understood that we needed farmers, that we need to understand a growing cycle and had a President who understood the place of food and made it his mission to pull up the lawn at the White House and started growing his own food.

We understanding that eating is an ethical act.

And understanding that we have an obesity crisis. Making healthy food is in our DNA now.

What's happened in the past 10 years is we're thinking about food in a completely different way.